I got my taste in music from my parents, and my father was the one who introduced me to Billy Joel. It’s an association that has outlasted two technologies; my parents have The Stranger and An Innocent Man on record and Storm Front and River of Dreams on cassette cape, and I’ve got the four-volume Greatest Hits on CD. Most rock singers peak and fade quickly, and their songs only capture what they were at one moment in life. Mr. Joel, however, was productive for a very long time, and it’s very interesting to just listen to the Greatest Hits CDs sequentially and see how a man’s perspective changes with time.

One day, I think it was when I was in college and visiting home, my father and I were on a drive somewhere, and Piano Man was playing on the radio. In the song, Billy Joel’s character is a piano man at a bar reminiscing on what a bunch of losers everyone around him is:

Now Paul is a real estate novelist \ Who never had time for a wife \ And he’s talking with Davy \ who’s still in the navy \ And probably will be for life \ And the waitress is practicing politics \ As the businessmen slowly get stoned \ Yes, they’re sharing a drink they call loneliness \ But it’s better than drinking alone

At this point, my dad pointed out that the piano man is being presumptuous in his pity for these people. Perhaps Paul is really devoted to his career and not marrying was the right choice for him. And the Navy is a perfectly good and honorable career. Perhaps they’re unhappy, but the song doesn’t say so, so it’s just as likely to be the narrator’s imagination. Really, nothing he sees justifies his dire conclusions about the people in the bar. I hadn’t thought about it before, but once it was pointed out to me, I could see this smug sense of superiority throughout the song and in several others of the “early” Billy Joel era. I can understand and pity these people because I live on a higher level of sensitivity and authenticity. It’s a very common attitude among young men of an artistic or intellectual bent. I was infected with a bit of it at the time myself; subtle hints like this from my father helped me outgrow it quickly.

Whether the point he’s making is good or bad, Joel is a songwriter who always puts a lot of thought into his lyrics; he at least tries to say something interesting, not just catchy. One can’t assume a complete identity between him and the roles he puts on. It could be that Joel meant the piano man to be arrogant and over-dramatic. I’ve never been able to work up any offense at his most blasphemous song, Only the Good Die Young, because he right away establishes some distance between himself and the character. The latter’s argument

Come out, Virginia- Don’t let me wait. / You Catholic girls start much too late. / Ah! But sooner or later it comes down to fate. / I might as well will be the one.

is so absurd, and it’s so impossible to imagine a girl actually going for it, that we know Joel can’t be speaking entirely in his own voice.

My father was also the one to notice that Joel’s perspectives changed significantly with age. The later songs aren’t about girl chasing or other young men’s interests anymore. As he put it, they sound more like the voice of a man with a family and responsibilities. He pointed this out when we were listening to the “later” Joel song, The Downeaster Alexa. This is one of the lesser-known Billy Joel songs, but one that my dad and I both really like.

Well I’m on the Downeaster “Alexa”
And I’m cruising through Block Island Sound
I have charted a course to the Vineyard
But tonight I am Nantucket bound

We took on diesel back in Montauk yesterday
And left this morning from the bell in Gardiner’s Bay
Like all the locals here I’ve had to sell my home
Too proud to leave I worked my fingers to the bone

So I could own my Downeaster “Alexa”
And I go where the ocean is deep
There are giants out there in the canyons
And a good captain can’t fall asleep

I’ve got bills to pay and children who need clothes
I know there’s fish out there but where God only knows
They say these waters aren’t what they used to be
But I’ve got people back on land who count on me

…

Now I drive my Downeaster “Alexa”
More and more miles from shore every year
Since they tell me I can’t sell no stripers
And there’s no luck in swordfishing here.

I was a bayman like my father was before
Can’t make a living as a bayman anymore
There ain’t much future for a man who works the sea
But there ain’t no island left for islanders like me

The man who used to warn that “working too hard can give you a heart attack-ack-ack-ack-ack” has come to take the father’s provider role very seriously.

The thing that most strikes me about Joel’s later songs is his growing focus on transience, the sense that no matter how much we cherish them, all things are destined to pass away. We certainly see it in the above song, where the character loves and wishes to carry on his father’s way of life but sees this way of life being destroyed by large impersonal forces that, in the long run, he cannot resist (the depletion of the fish population, in this case). It’s a sentiment that certainly speaks to us reactionaries.

I think what happened is that time and a growing sense of mortality have turned Billy Joel from a cocky Jew into a sober atheist. He knows–it’s the one thing that atheists know with unmatched clarity–that our time is short, very short. One day, I was playing on the floor with little 12 month-old Julie with the CD player on in the background, and I happened to catch the lyrics

This is the time to remember \ Cause it will not last forever \ These are the days \ To hold on to \Cause we won’t \ Although we’ll want to

Nothing profound, but it hits me with more force than it used to.

Where is the comfort for an atheist, when he realizes that extinction is the fate of all things? One of Billy Joel’s last songs was a lullabye to his daughter Alexa.

Goodnight, my angel
Now it’s time to sleep
And still so many things I want to say
Remember all the songs you sang for me
When we went sailing on an emerald bay
And like a boat out on the ocean
I’m rocking you to sleep
The water’s dark and deep
Inside this ancient heart
You’ll always be a part of me

…

Goodnight, my angel
Now it’s time to dream
And dream how wonderful your life will be
Someday your child may cry
And if you sing this lullabye
Then in your heart
There will always be a part of me

Someday we’ll all be gone
But lullabyes go on and on…
They never die
That’s how you
And I
Will be

This is how an atheist faces death. He turns to his children, and thinks that perhaps a part of him will live on in them. But then he remembers that someday they too will be gone. Everyone he knew and loved will be not only dead but forgotten. However we reach forward, no one can claim a place in the distant future. If a higher meaning is to be found, we must look outside of time. As he rocks his daughter to sleep, he senses that, although they are two distinct people–unique beings whose time is short, what they participate in, the love of fathers and daughters, is something ancient, perhaps even eternal. Someday we’ll all be gone, but this moment we’re touching and enacting something of ultimate significance.

It’s interesting to wonder what’s going on with Bonald on CAGW, race realism, and now missile defense. Perhaps it is what he says above, that he thinks they are distractions from the important issues we should be paying attention to. Perhaps it is what “Anonymous at 69″ is saying, that he has been socialized into these opinions and has not yet gotten around to evaluating them critically. Perhaps it is what I said in an earlier post, that he is, though habit or worry about being eventually unmasked, respecting taboos whose violation he knows carries real consequences, especially for the untenured. My theory, while tempting, has the problem that he has described himself as moderately anti-semitic (in those or almost those words), which would seem to be a third rail as problematic as the others.

How indeed to explain me? I’m sure that what I find plausible is socially constructed, because that’s true of everybody. I tend to be extremely suspicious of expert opinion only when it contradicts my core beliefs. In other areas, I put the burden of proof on the dissenters. On the other hand, it’s not likely that I’m peppering in a few PC beliefs thinking that they’ll protect me if I get exposed. Bill himself points out problems with this theory, but let me spell them out further. The one topic on which the elite will really brook no dissent is sodomy, and I’ve pretty definitely taken the most unacceptable view possible on that. No amount of support for carbon taxes could save a man with my stated views on homosexuality, abortion, divorce, and censorship.

I really do think that we should avoid putting non-core issues on the same level as core issues. Lydia’s feelings reflect my own:

Social conservatives, those of us on the unabashed American right, are tired of being told to go to the back of the bus by our supposed “own” party.

I’m tired of being told that I should just shut up and vote for tax cuts for the upper classes so that maybe, someday in the unspecified future, my social betters will repay me with a parental notice for abortions law. Let’s face it: it wasn’t love for the rich that protected them from getting strung up by the communists. People only risked their fortunes, reputations, and lives fighting the Reds for two reasons: love of God and love of country. And how do the rich repay us? What causes do they support with their billions? Buggery and mass immigration. I admit that taxing those little homos into the poorhouse does hold a certain appeal to me.

So there’s the social conditioning and the irrational spite. I also have some reasons for my beliefs. I’m not sure what Bill is referring to on race realism. It’s true that I regard negro IQ as a distraction. What really matters is that blacks are a distinct subculture and that they’re being used as a wedge minority. On strategic missile defense, I think it’s a stupid idea because if I were going to attack the U.S., I certainly wouldn’t do it by shooting one nuke at us. I’d either shoot a shitload of missiles at once, if I had them, or, if I didn’t, I would sneak in pieces of the bombs, assemble them in the States, and have local spies set them off. It’s a lot easier to make bombs than missles. SMD is easy to evade. I’m also convinced that no technologically advanced country would want to commit suicide by attacking us. We’re always being told that some of these countries–Iran in particular–are “crazy” and will do suicidal things just for the hell of it. I don’t buy it anymore. We say a lot more menacingly crazy things about them than they say about us. Do they go on and on about changing our “regime”?

I was a hawk during the Cold War because I’m in favor of killing communists–anytime, anywhere. I’ve got no heart for killing God-fearing Muslims.

That was painful to read–I must be guilty of at least 8 of these. I need to just shut up and go on a year-long penance. Anyway, those of you who are interested in spreading the Christian faith (which should be all of you who are Christians) might find it helpful. These are very easy pitfalls to fall into. Believe me.

Some coalition of hackers has decided to “out” reactionary bloggers so that we can be exposed to ridicule and job loss. Apparently, being anonymous and insignificant isn’t protection enough anymore. Behold the vindictiveness of our enemies.

Wicked thoughts like this have kept popping into my head during this Christmas visit to my in-laws. Julie has not taken well to sleeping in a new place, and I’ve gone through several nights when I got next to no sleep because of watching her. It reminds me of when she was a newborn, and I think to myself “God, do I want to go through that all over again?” and “Could my career take another hit like that?”

This is, of course, the hedonistic, materialistic “contraceptive mentality” that we reactionary Catholic bloggers are always railing against. I’m not particularly surprised to have experienced it; I’m a fallen man who has experienced lots of temptations in my day. Something about it surprises me, though.

I’ve realized that the drive for regular sleep is stronger than the drive for sex. Years ago, when I decided that I had to align my behavior with Catholic sexual morality, I would sometimes think to myself “What if this means I’ll die without having any kind of sexual release ever again?” The thought gave me a little panic. That was then. Maybe it’s that I’m older now, or maybe it’s that I’ve successfully reproduced once, but I’m finding the practice of celibacy much easier than I once did, and the thought of perpetual continence actually has some appeal. If Parvina (Mrs. Bonald) and I just abstain from this one activity (that we never have time or energy for anyway), our lives could be so much easier.

I know, that’s the Devil talking, preferring personal comfort to the generosity of making lives. Maybe it will go away when Julie gets older and I start missing having a baby around (and forgetting what it’s actually like). Julie was always adorable, but as she gets older, she keeps getting more fun, more responsive, and I even think more cute. Having another one wouldn’t mean rewinding in time; my first one would keep going forward in her delightful ways. I expect I’ll talk myself into having another one in a year or so. It’s a wonderful experience. Sometimes, though, you do think that it’s going to kill you.

First, thank you for your comments and all the thought you obviously put into them. I’ve been very impressed to have commenters who know a lot more about my topics than I do. Of course, what’s impressive is not that such people exist (my knowledge not being terribly hard to top), but that they keep bothering to come here and educate me. I’m sorry that I only respond to a few of my comments. Which ones I reply to has more to do with which happen to be on top when I get some free time than with anything else. Also, sometimes comments get held for my approval before they appear. This is because they have urls in them. It’s an automatic process I have nothing to do with, so again please don’t take it personally.

I will probably have less opportunity to post for the next couple of weeks. I’ll be visiting family, doing a little proposal writing, and scrambling to prepare for my spring class. On the plus side, I’m hoping to get a bit more chance to read. I’m afraid that I’ve violated the first rule of successful blogging; I used to read a lot, but for the past year, I’ve had much less time, and what I’ve had I’ve devoted to writing. I’ve been living off the store of knowledge and thinking that I’d built up in previous years, and now the stock is starting to run out. Also, I’ve been needing to cut back on polemical writing regardless. I’ve noticed lately that it’s been having a bad effect on my personality. It’s an effect I’m subject to when grading students’ homeworks. As more and more students make the same mistake, I start getting angrier and have to resist an urge to take more points off. I have to remind myself that this student doesn’t know that I’ve already corrected a dozen prior students for the same faulty thinking. Similarly, I find that I treat the first person to make an argument I don’t like much differently from the tenth person to make that argument, but that isn’t fair. I have sometimes not treated my commenters and fellow bloggers with the respect they deserve, and I’m very sorry for that. I’m going to try to take a less combative stance for a while.

Blogging will then probably pick up in January, although not at the level it’s been at lately (a level which has meant more time than I really should be devoting to a hobby and is probably venially sinful). Someday, I expect I’ll have to cut back to infrequent writing. Hopefully, by that time there will be a joint Orthosphere blog I can contribute to, so that there’ll still be an audience for my stuff.

Oh, for those of you who don’t know, “Orthosphere” is the name Bruce and Proph decided on for our circle of reactionary Christian bloggers. Kind of neat, don’t you think? “Behold, the Orthosphere!”

Let us first realize how unprecedented our situation is. The great Emile Durkheim identified the key new feature of modern society as its being built around “organic solidarity” as opposed to “mechanical solidarity”. In premodern societies, each household performs similar economic functions and does so largely indepedently each other. Thus, it makes sense to have a single standard and set of expectations for everyone (or, rather, one for men and another for women), because, except for small ruling and clerical classes, everybody does pretty much the same things. In modern societies, we’ve replaced this with a system where everybody’s pooled into one tightly connected economic system, and we’ve pursued specialization and a division of labor so that people do very different things. Each person has a single, tiny focus, and relies on everybody else to supply his other needs. This destroys the “mechanical” solidarity of one standard for everybody, but it creates a new “organic” solidarity around our much tighter interconnection. In the short run, modernity creates alienation: specialization and individualism erode our sense of community. But Durkheim was convinced that the cure was to go all out for modernity, and it will cure its own problems. Once inheritance is gotten rid of (based as it was on the idea of household independence and thus no longer making sense) and wealth is based on merit, our economic system will no longer seem unfair. Our sense of alienation will be cured by the specialization that caused it: new profession-specific societies will provide us with the sense of belonging we have lost. Individualism itself will serve as a common creed to replace all the other social creeds it destroyed. (My understanding of Durkheim is based on these selections.)

Modernity’s true ideology, one shared by nearly everyone, is the “career”. Every adult should have a career, and this career should be the main organizing principle in his life. A career presumes organic solidarity: a man’s career is supposed to take him away from home and family and set him to work producing something to be consumed by society at large, rather than by his own kin. This, however, isn’t enough to make work a career; this just makes it a “job”. A career is also supposed to be the prime outlet for a man’s creativity, intelligence, and initiative. His bonds with his coworkers (with whom he spends more waking hours than he does with his spouse) provide him a sense of belonging and common purpose. Career is the ultimate fulfillment of Durkheim’s vision.

Career has largely devoured older forms of belonging–home, tribe, religion–just as Durkheim hoped it would. There are certainly economic factors in this: the extreme division of labor certainly brings certain efficiencies with it. It could well be–I will not speculate on it here–that a sufficiently dense population is stuck with organic solidarity. What interests me, though, is the ideology, the fact that we have decided to regard this as a liberation rather than a curse. What’s more, we have outpaced economic forces, deliberately attacking other ways of organizing one’s life.

The romantic conception of work–that it uniquely manifests the “species-life” of man as an intelligent, creative individual–arguably goes back to Locke’s defense of private property. It is given full expression in Marx’s early writings (especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844). Of course, for Marx, this vision was an indictment of the modern system, because it was obvious to him that the wage-employed hyper-specialized laborer of his day was not engaging in expressively creative work. Similar criticisms came later from the Agrarians/Distributists. For both Marxists and Distributists, employment and the division of labor are inherently alienating and must be abolished.

The ideology of the modern age, which we may call “careerism”, has done a remarkable thing in accepting the Marxist/Distributist romanticized vision of work as the outlet for creativity and saying that the current system instantiates this ideal, at least for those with true careers. Adherents of feminism, an aspect of careerism, would no doubt take offense at the idea that they are proponents of the capitalist system, but this is hardly credible, given that they preach that no woman can be fulfilled without being part of it. Most people, of course, wouldn’t call themselves anything as radical (i.e. anything as explicit) as feminists, but they accept the careerist creed. No one thinks it controversial to tell children to start dreaming about the careers that could “empower”/”fullfil”them and let them “change the world”. When we tell these kids to study hard and get good careers so they can “make something of themselves”, it doesn’t strike us as insulting to those without careers–who are therefore presumably not “something”–although it should. We never come out and say “your career should be the focal point of your life; everything else should be organized around it”, but this is implied in the way we live and the advice we give our children.

Well, what’s wrong with telling everyone to look for a rewarding and challenging career that will make them “something”? The ideal of careerism is, after all, somewhat broad; it blesses a great variety of callings. The trouble is that it’s still not broad enough. One of the main criticisms leveled at medieval Christianity (and at medieval Buddhism, to the extent anyone but me criticizes Buddhism) is that it was a religion aimed at clergy. Its vision of human excellence supposedly required one to be a priest, monk, or nun, and it had nothing to say to a layman who wanted to acheive holiness in his lay life. In short, it valorized a far too small part of the human experience. Now, whether or not this is a fair criticism of medieval Christianity is a topic for another time, but it is quite odd that the same people who level this charge don’t realize that their own ideology is obviously guilty of it. Most people don’t have careers, not in the sense of careerist ideology. This ideology is then forced to regard these people, or at least their way of life, as fundamentally defective.

Today’s world is an exact analogue of the popular image of the “theocratic” Middle Ages: a society designed for clergy where a majority of the populace were not clergy. Today, we offer career as the priviledged means of personal fulfillment, but most people don’t have careers. Thus, careerism has shown great intolerance, or at least a stunning lack of sympathy for, those who don’t fit the careerist pattern: religious contemplatives, unskilled workers (i.e. those with “jobs” rather than “careers”), and housewives.

The hostility of modernity to the consecrated religious life is so open and extreme that little needs to be said about it. Closing monastaries and convents is a quintessentially modern thing to do (as is guillotining their former occupants). What’s really striking is that the contempt for the contemplative life has seeped down even to Catholic apologists. How often have we heard them tell us that the great thing about the Rule of Saint Benedict is that it forced the monks to work and so valorized labor as a path to holiness, or some such nonsense? We are then unseemily eager to point out that the monks performed social services like distributing alms. We seem positively embarrassed to admit that the primary purpose of these institutions was prayer and worship. (Here modernity has been more gentle with the Buddhists. Nobody asks how much of Buddhist monastaries’ resources goes to poor relief or reclaiming swamps. People seem to accept that that’s not the purpose of these organizations. Sometimes they even recognize that having an organization with explicitly spiritual aims might be a valuable thing.)

What about that majority of men (and now women) whose jobs involve no particular skill or creativity, who generally don’t see their job as a calling but mostly as a way to pay the bills, who work 9 to 5 and then return to their more cherished home life, who find their life’s meaning in family, hobbies, or something other than the job? For rhetorical purposes (the purpose of posing as a voice of the majority), the careerist ideology will sometimes say that these people have careers, but if it says that, it must admit that they are inadequate careers. They certainly don’t measure up to what a career should be. Something is wrong with these people. We may say it is their fault: they’re just lazy or dumb. We may be more generous and say it’s society’s fault for not educating them enough. What we certainly won’t do is defend their way of life. Our rulers rather work to destroy it through free trade and mass immigration. There’s something very wrong that it is becoming harder and harder to support a family–or even maintain a job–without becoming some kind of college-credentialed specialist, but for our politicians (especially, I’m sad to say, our Republican politicians) the answer is always career retraining and more higher eduction so that everyone can become an engineer or entrepeneur. This is how beholden to careerism they are.

Finally, there are the housewives, who endure as much hostility as the monks. They are the last representatives of mechanical solidarity: the home as a place of valuable and creative work, not just relaxation and consumption. Feminism exists largely to eliminate this holdout. According to careerism, one needs a career to have an outlet for one’s creativity and initiative and to be socially engaged. I am fond of pointing out on this blog that most jobs (and even most careers) involve less, or at least no more, opportunity for creativity and initiative than organizing and keeping a household and educating children. In fact, Chesterton’s argument against women having jobs basically comes down to the claim that it would dull them. Men have already been narrowed by specialization; let us not lose the womans’ generalism too. Of course, Chesterton’s goal wasn’t just to keep women in the home; he was more ambitious than that. His goal was to bring the men back home too, as farmers and artisans. Is it workable? Or is it–like Marxism–an accurate diagnosis of the tendency of careerism to distort the soul tied to an unworkable cure?

I’m not sure. I’m convinced that conservatives must fight careerism, explicit and implicit, when it erodes the morale of these other honorable ways of life. We are the natural allies of the cleric, the unambitious family man, and the housewife. Some people, men and women, indeed have callings to a career, and God speed to them. I decided I wanted to be a physicist in third grade. In fifth grade, my mother once punished me by forbidding me to read about the theory of relativity for a weekend. By junior high, I had taught myself multivariable calculus. (I used to sneak into my parents’ bedroom to read my father’s college calculus book–I needed it to follow an exposition I’d found on the Euler-Lagrange equations. For some reason, I thought this was something I wasn’t supposed to be doing.) Most of the other kids I knew weren’t like that. As seniors in high school, they didn’t know what they wanted to “do with their lives”, even as the pressures to find a career calling in their souls got ever stronger. Most people don’t have a particular career calling–their passions lie elsewhere–and there’s nothing wrong with that. It may be necessary in today’s world for the man to take on a career, and not just a job, anyway, to work as if he had a passion he doesn’t have. I do not concede this, but I admit the possibility. Let us put up a fight, though, before we let careerism devour home life as a whole. We certainly should not push women, whom nature has particularly ordained to the care of young children, into the careerist path unless they have a genuine calling for it. It may still be necessary (and given how the non-work related social world has been practically deserted, it may even sometimes be desireable) for noncareer women to have jobs, so long as their maternal duties come first. Patriarchy gives no inflexible rules here. It only demands that family duties come before work in our self-understanding. In fact, family duties inform our understanding of work, i.e. seeing it primarily in terms of the father’s provider role rather than as a means to “self-actualization”.